[Releasing] [Development] Qt 5.7.0 beta snapshot available - gtk 3 and packaging on RHEL 6

[Frederik Gladhorn]

Hello all,

for Linux packaging we currently use a Red Hat 6 which seemed like a good 
compromise at the time.

I have been pondering https://bugreports.qt.io/browse/QTBUG-52259 for a while 
and don't seem to reach a conclusion.
We had a contribution porting our gtk 2 theme to gtk 3 (thanks Dmitry!).
The question is how to proceed, from what I can tell, it's not trivial to get 
gtk3 built on rhel6.
For Linux distributions this is of course not a problem, but the Qt installer 
is currently built without any gtk plugin compiled.
In the future (Qt 5.8), I'd like to switch to rhel 7 as packaging platform, so 
this problem should go away.

For Qt 5.7, the options seem to be:
1.) ignore the problem and ship Qt packages in the installer without gtk theme
2.) revert the patch to have the gtk2 theme for one release longer and only 
have gtk3 with Qt 5.8
3.) package on rhel 7, but I'm told, we're already too late in the cycle

Any ideas appreciated. In general I have a hard time seeing how to cleanly 
create packages on Linux, unless we basically ship an entire distro (similar 
to Chrome and others)... I'd love to learn about good approaches, since 
packaging on something "old enough to run everywhere" and "new enough to allow 
all dependencies to be built" seems hard to achieve.

Sadly we don't have the resources to create native packages for each and every 
distro (we want to allow our users to use Qt on older releases of their 
favorite distro) and I'm not sure if packagers would be willing to help us get 
into a situation where it's easy to create packages for all relevant 
distributions, installing into custom prefixes and having a mix of versions.

So for the time being I have been convinced that creating the installers is 
valuable for many people on Linux, but I wonder if there's a way we can do 
better.

Cheers,
Frederik

PS: there are some more issues with old distros and packaging... gstreamer 
0.10 comes to mind, next to bluez dependencies.


On Monday, April 11, 2016 12:47:03 PM Heikkinen Jani wrote:
> Hi all,
> 
> 
> We have new Qt 5.7.0 beta snapshot available
> 
> 
> Windows: http://download.qt.io/snapshots/qt/5.7/5.7.0-beta/407/
> 
> Linux: http://download.qt.io/snapshots/qt/5.7/5.7.0-beta/389/
> 
> Src:http://download.qt.io/snapshots/qt/5.7/5.7.0-beta/latest_src/ (Under
> mirroring)
> 
> 
> Mac packages are still missing, retry is ongoing. Please test the packages &
> report your findings in Jira. We need good testing coverage now to see how
> close the beta we are. We are trying to get beta out as soon as possible
> and so on we need to know all beta blockers at the moment. So please make
> sure all beta beta blockers have '5.7.0 beta' in Fix Version(s) -field & so
> on visible in beta blocker list
> (https://bugreports.qt.io/issues/?filter=17576)
> 
> 
> Windows and Linux packages are RTA smoke tested & seems to be pretty much
> OK.
> 
> 
> Known issues from the packages:https://bugreports.qt.io/issues/?filter=17601
> 
> 
> br,
> 
> Jani